Google Base now accepting all your data

Google Base, heralded as a new competitor for Craigslist and eBay is live and …

After last month's false launch, Google Base has officially thrown down the gauntlet. At first glance, Google Base appears to be a direct competitor for online communities such as eBay and Craigslist, Google denies that is the case.

Marc Leibowitz, Web search and syndication director, said Google merely wants to serve people who have information to share that is not already on a Web site and being crawled by a search engine to open it up to the public. In addition, much of the information in Google Base is expected to be noncommercial, a Google spokesman said.

For those of you living under a rock, Craigslist is a massive online community that has become most known for its colorful personal ads and classifieds sections. However, Craigslist is flawed in one irrepairable way — it is very much a jack of all trades and master of none. Their search is fairly limited and their input forms are the same regardless of whether you are posting an item for sale or looking for some new partner to go clubbing with.

Google Base has taken the generic posting form and enhanced it with steroids. When posting an item to Google Base the user selects a category, either from a predefined list or by creating their own. If they chose a category from the list then a specialized posting form will be displayed with attributes specific to that category. There is also the option to add custom attributes. If the user chose to define their own category then all the attributes are custom. Rather than forcing everything into a catch-all description field, Google Base allows specific descriptors to be specified which makes searching not only more accurate, but also more efficient.

Another advantage Google has over its competition is that it has the ability to include the Google Base postings in their other search indexes and it appears that this notion hasn't escaped Google.

[..] based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle and Google Local.

I can just imagine going to Froogle and searching for those rare discontinued Beanie Babies and being overjoyed because someone right down the road from me is selling his ex-wife's collection for pennies! Speaking of pennies, this would appear to be a perfect marketplace for Google to test its rumored micro-payment service. The option to use Paypal for payments for items is mysteriously missing and whether that has to do with the fact that eBay owns Paypal, or if Google is intending to take on Craigslist and eBay remains to be seen.

Comparisons with Craigslist and eBay aside, Google Base is much more than an online classifieds site. The Frequently Asked Questions area of the site has this to say:

If you have information you want to share with others, but aren't sure how to go about gaining an audience, Google Base is for you.

It seems as though Google intends to index every piece of data in existence and this is yet another portal for doing just that.